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"We've signed a lease for new office space at the Breithaupt Block to accommodate the natural growth of our engineering and development team at our Kitchener-Waterloo office," Leslie Church, a spokesperson for Google Canada, confirmed in an email statement late Thursday.

There had been speculation for some time that Google, which has been running out of room at its current location in the Tannery building in Kitchener, would move into larger quarters in the Breithaupt Block.

Confirmation came after Allied Properties Real Estate Investment Trust, which owns 50 per cent of the development at Breithaupt and King streets, announced Thursday that a "substantial tenant" had signed a long-term lease for 185,000 square feet of space, starting later this year and the rest in the early part of 2016.

An additional two-storey building is being developed on the property for early 2016.

Iain Klugman, chief executive at Communitech, said an announcement about what will happen with the space that Google is currently using in at the Tannery building will be made at a later date.

Google's presence in Waterloo Region has been steadily growing since it arrived here in 2005 through the acquisition of Reqwireless, a mobile phone software developer.

At that time, it had about 30 employees in the University of Waterloo's research and technology park. By the time it moved into the 34,000 square feet of space in the Tannery in 2011, it had grown to about 100 employees, and now, it employs 240 people in Kitchener.

The Breithaupt Block property initially consisted of six industrial buildings in Kitchener's warehouse district with about 176,000 square feet of leasable space and two acres of surplus land. At the end of last year, about 23 per cent of it had been leased.

Last week, a commercial real estate company, Cushman & Wakefield, said in a news release that Google had reportedly leased the remainder of the brick and beam space.

According to Allied Properties, the additional two-storey building being developed for early 2016 will bring the total leasable space on that block to 221,000 square feet.

Craig Beattie, a partner in Perimeter Development Corp., which owns the other 50 per cent of the Breithaupt Block, said the company is excited to finish off the project.

The signing of such a major tenant is "further evidence of the strength and interest in companies to locate in the urban core of the city," Beattie said.

He said many companies want to locate close to existing and future transit such as the light rail transit and the other amenities in the core, in order to provide a better work environment for their employees to help them attract and retain top talent.